Recent studies of wage bargaining and unemployment have emphasized the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and that unions act in the interest of insiders. Yet one typically assumes that insiders and recently hired outsiders are paid the same wage. We consider a model where the starting...

This paper challenges the traditional view that unemployment is high because insiders determine the union wage. The insiders in this paper are characterized by being more efficient when they search for a job than the outsiders, implying that they experience relatively less unemployment. We...

We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity restrictions and price regulations adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a...

Why do many democracies fail to reform their labor-market institutions? To answer this question we study the feasibility of reforms that include compensation to insiders for the removal of labor-market regulations. Under asymmetric information, a reformer who wants to buy the approval of voters...